Nonviolence by Mark Kurlansky

Bartolomé de las Casas, who was born in Spain in 1474, and was possibly the first Catholic priest ordained in the Americas, wanted to establish towns in the Americas where Indians and Spaniards could live together in peace. “For this is nothing elsethan making the coming and passion of Christ useless … as long as innumerable human beings are slaughtered in a war waged on the pretext of preaching the gospel and spreading religion.” But he could find little Spanish support for such a project.
    In 1542 de las Casas claimed to have seen the indigenous population of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola reduced from three million to two hundred survivors. The reason, he said, that this extermination was possible was that “of all the infinite universe of humanity, these people are the most guileless, the most devoid of wickedness and duplicity, the most obedient and faithful to their native masters and to the Spanish Christians whom they serve…. Yet into this sheepfold, into the land of meek outcasts there came some Spaniards who immediately behaved like ravening wild beasts….” As Gandhi would observe centuries later, it would take more than meekness to survive European empire builders.
    In North America, the Cherokee took a different approach. The largest pre-European nation in what was to become the United States, the Cherokee had a rich culture and a developed agricultural economy by the time Europeans arrived. After seeing that a military response was disastrous, in 1820 they adopted an American-style democracy, with an elected leader, a House, and a Senate. Seven years later they declared themselves to be again a nation, with a capital in Georgia. They developed written characters for their language and wrote laws and published a newspaper. For a few years they seemed able to coexist with their sister democracy, the United States. This might have continued were it not for the discovery of gold on their land.
    In 1830 the U.S. Congress debated the “Indian Removal Act.” Tennessee congressman Davy Crockett staked and lost his political future on opposing the bill, and when it passed, he left Washington for Texas, saying, “I would sooner be honestly damned than hypocritically immortalized.” The Cherokee went to court and won in the Supreme Court when Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that the Cherokee nation was sovereign and the removal act was illegal. Such an act would have to be negotiated between the Cherokee and the U.S. government.
    This would have been a great triumph for nonviolence and the rule of law, except that President Andrew Jackson, the great advocate of Indian removal, was able to find a small Cherokee faction of fewer than 500 people in a nation of 17,000 who were agreeable to removal. A treaty was signed with them and was ratified in the U.S. Senate, passing by only one vote over the vociferous objection of such leading figures as Daniel Webster and Henry Clay. When seven thousand army troops were ordered to force-march the Cherokee, all 17,000, to what is now Oklahoma, the commanding officer, John Wool, resigned in protest and was replaced by General Winfield Scott, whose march, known in history as “the Trail of Tears,” nunna daul Tsuny in the Cherokee language, was so brutal that 4,000 Cherokees died. The Cherokee had lost their faith in nonviolence and put to death the leaders of the small contingent that had signed the removal treaty.
    But in a remote corner of the far-flung British Empire, there was a people who took on the British with classic nonviolent activism. The far South Pacific seems to have been one of the last places settled by humans. The few islands beyond Australia are not near anyone else nor on the way to anywhere. The first people to go there were Polynesians. In 950, a Polynesian navigator named Kupe discovered the islands, which are today New Zealand. Following his discovery there was a sizable migration of Polynesians to these un-inhabited islands.
    Polynesians